John Langshaw Austin

First published Tue Dec 11, 2012

John Langshaw Austin (1911–1960) was White's Professor
of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He made a number of
contributions in various areas of philosophy, including important work
on knowledge, perception, action, freedom, truth, language, and the use
of language in speech acts. Distinctions that Austin draws in his work
on speech acts—in particular his distinction between locutionary,
illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts—have assumed something
like canonical status in more recent work. His work on knowledge and
perception places him in a broad tradition of “Oxford
Realism”, running from Cook Wilson and Harold Arthur Prichard
through to J. M. Hinton, M. G. F. Martin, John McDowell, Paul Snowdon,
Charles Travis, and Timothy Williamson. His work on truth has played an
important role in recent discussions of the extent to which sentence
meaning can be accounted for in terms of truth-conditions.

Austin was born in Lancaster, England 26 March 1911 to Geoffrey
Langshaw Austin and his wife Mary Austin (née Bowes-Wilson). The
family moved to Scotland in 1922, where Austin's father taught at
St. Leonard's School, St. Andrews.

Austin took up a scholarship in Classics at Shrewsbury School in 1924,
and, in 1929, went on to study Classics at Balliol College, Oxford. In
1933, he received a First in Literae Humaniores (Classics and
Philosophy) in 1933 and was elected to a Fellowship at All Souls
College, Oxford. He undertook his first teaching position in 1935, as
fellow and tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Austin's early interests included Aristotle, Kant, Leibniz,
and Plato (especially Theaetetus). His more contemporary
influences included especially G. E. Moore, John Cook Wilson, and H. A.
Prichard. (Austin attended Prichard's undergraduate lectures with
such vigour that Prichard is reported to have made an unsuccessful
attempt to exclude him.) It's plausible that some aspects of
Austin's distinctive approach to philosophical questions derived
from his engagement with the last three. All three philosophers shaped
their views about general philosophical questions on the basis of
careful attention to the more specific judgments we make. And they took
our specific judgments (for instance, in Moore's case, “I
know that I have hands”) to be, in general, more secure than more
general judgments (for instance, again in Moore's case, “I
know things about external reality”). Moreover, there are some
continuities of doctrine, especially with Cook Wilson and Prichard,
which align Austin with an “Oxford Realist” school of
philosophy. The core components of the latter view are, first, that
perception and knowledge are primitive forms of apprehension and,
second, that what we apprehend are ordinary elements of our
environments that are independent of our apprehending them. (All three
thinkers were at one or another time committed to versions of both
components of the position but for complex reasons sometimes wavered
about the second. See e.g., Kalderon and Travis 2013.)

During the Second World War, Austin served in the British Intelligence
Corps. It has been said of him that, “he more than anybody was
responsible for the life-saving accuracy of the D-Day
intelligence” (reported in Warnock 1963: 9). Austin left the
army in September 1945 with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was
honoured for his intelligence work with an Order of the British
Empire, the French Croix de Guerre, and the U.S. Officer of the Legion
of Merit.

Austin Married Jean Coutts in 1941. They had four children, two
girls and two boys.

After the War, Austin returned to Oxford. He became White's
Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1952. In the same year, he took on the
role of delegate to Oxford University Press, becoming Chairman of the
Finance Committee in 1957. His other administrative work for the
University included the role of Junior Proctor (1949–50), and
Chairman of the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy (1953–55). He was
president of the Aristotelian Society 1956–57. He gave the
William James Lectures in Harvard in 1955 (a version of the lectures
was published as How to Do Things With Words (1962b). He
invented the card game CASE in 1951.

During this period, Austin edited H. W. N. Joseph Lectures on
the Philosophy of Leibniz (1949) and produced a translation of
Gottlob Frege's Grundlagen der Arithmetik, so that it
could be set as an exam (1950). Austin wrote little and published less.
Much of his influence was through teaching and other forms of
small-scale engagement with philosophers. He also instituted a series
of “Saturday Morning” discussion sessions, which involved
detailed discussions of a number of philosophical topics and works,
including Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, Frege's
Grundlagen, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical
Investigations, Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of
Perception, and Noam Chomsky's Syntactic
Structures.

In this section, we'll look at Austin's views about the
role of the study of language in philosophy more generally. It is
common to count Austin as an “Ordinary Language
Philosopher”, along with, for example, Gilbert Ryle, P. F.
Strawson, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. However, although each of these
thinkers was sometimes concerned, in one or another way, with our use
of ordinary language, it is far from clear what in addition to that the
label is supposed to entail. And it is equally unclear that the various
thinkers so-labelled deserve to be grouped together.

Austin cared about language for two main reasons. First, language use
is a central part of human activity, so it's an important topic in its
own right. Second, the study of language is an aide—indeed, for
some topics, an important preliminary—to the pursuit of
philosophical topics. Many of Austin's most distinctive reflections on
the use of language arise in the course of discussion of other topics
(see especially his “A Plea for Excuses” 1957).

One route to understanding Austin's general approach to
philosophy is provided by reflection on the following comment by Stuart
Hampshire:

[Austin] was constitutionally unable to refrain from applying the
same standards of truth and accuracy to a philosophical argument,
sentence by sentence, as he would have applied to any other serious
subject-matter. He could not have adopted a special tone of voice, or
attitude of mind, for philosophical questions. (Hampshire 1960:
34)

In short, it mattered to Austin that, in attempting to make out
positions and arguments, philosophers should meet ordinary standards of
truth, accuracy, and so forth. On the one hand, this presented a
general challenge to philosophers, a challenge that they might easily
fail to meet. The challenge is either to make use of an ordinary
vocabulary, or ordinary concepts, in order to make claims or judgments
that are, according to ordinary standards, at least true (or accurate,
etc.); or to do the serious work required to set up an appropriate
technical vocabulary and then use it to say things that are by
appropriate standards true (accurate, etc.). On the other hand, it
provided Austin with what he took to be a reasonably secure approach to
general philosophical questions: first, find a connection between those
general philosophical questions and the more specific claims or
judgments that we ordinarily make and take ourselves to be secure in
making; second, make sufficiently many of the relevant claims or
judgments, in a sufficient variety of circumstances, in order to
address the general philosophical questions.

Austin held that, in their hurry to address general philosophical
questions, philosophers have a tendency to ignore the nuances involved
in making and assessing ordinary claims and judgments. Among the risks
associated with insensitivity to the nuances, two stand out. First,
philosophers are liable to miss distinctions that are made in our
ordinary use of language and that are relevant to our concerns and
claims. Second, failure to exploit fully the resources of ordinary
language can make philosophers susceptible to seemingly forced choices
between unacceptable alternatives. Here Austin warns:

It is worth bearing in mind…the general rule that we must not
expect to find simple labels for complicated cases…however
well-equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all
possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer
than diction. (1957: 195)

On Austin's view, language is likely to be well designed for
the ends to which it is ordinarily put. But special, or especially
complicated, cases may require special treatment. This is apt to be an
especial liability when it comes to the question whether a sentence can
be used in a particular circumstance to state something true or
false:

We say, for example, that a certain statement is exaggerated or
vague or bold, a description somewhat rough or misleading or not very
good, an account rather general or too concise. In cases like these it
is pointless to insist on deciding in simple terms whether the
statement is ‘true or false’. Is it true or false that
Belfast is north of London? That the galaxy is the shape of a fried
egg? That Beethoven was a drunkard? That Wellington won the battle of
Waterloo? There are various degrees and dimensions of success
in making statements: the statements fit the facts always more or less
loosely, in different ways on different occasions for different intents
and purposes. (1950a: 129–130)

Austin makes two points here. First, when faced with a putative
choice of this sort, we should not insist on deciding in simple
terms whether a statement is true or false (or whether an
expression applies or fails to apply to something). Some cases are
complicated, and, in some of those cases, we are capable of meeting
some of the complications by saying more: “Well, it is true that
Belfast is north of London if you understand that claim in the
following way….” Second, the complications can take
different forms, and can matter in different ways, on different
occasions. Given the prior course of our conversation, and our specific
intents and purposes in discussing the issue, it might be manifest
that, on that particular occasion, we will understand the
complications, without a need for their articulation, so that the
following is fine as it stands: “Yes, it is true that Belfast is
north of London.”

Austin's summarised his view of the role of attention to
ordinary language in philosophy thus:

First, words are our tools, and, as a minimum, we should use clean
tools: we should know what we mean and what we do not, and we must
forearm ourselves against the traps that language sets us. Secondly,
words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we
need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and
against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and
arbitrariness, and can re-look at the world without blinkers. Thirdly,
and more hopefully, our common stock of words embodies all the
distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have
found worth making, in the lifetimes of many generations: these surely
are likely to be more sound, since they have stood up to the long test
of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all
ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are
likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon—the most
favoured alternative method. (1957:
181–182)[1]

Austin holds, then, that an important preliminary to philosophising
on at least some topics—for instance, where the topic is
‘ordinary and reasonably practical’—would be the
detailed study of the language we use to speak on that topic, and of
the way that we use it.

Austin didn't think that the investigation of language was
more than a preliminary to theorising, either in philosophy or science.
He wasn't averse to theory construction, even if its outcome were
potentially revisionary (see e.g., 1957: 189). His concern was only
that such theorising should be properly grounded, and that it should
not be driven, for example, by an initial failure to keep track of
distinctions that we mark in our ordinary use of language.

It's fair to say that Austin's work has been caught up in the stampede
away from broadly ordinary language-based approaches to philosophical
questions. The work of Paul Grice, collected in his Studies in the
Way of Words (1989), has played an important role in the negative
assessment of such approaches, including aspects of Austin's work. One
central idea in Grice's work is that the ways in which we use
language—crudely, the pairings of situations and sentences that
we find appropriate or inappropriate, or what we would or wouldn't say
in those situations—is not a simple function of the nature of
the respective situations and the correctness conditions with which
the sentences are associated. Rather, judgments about appropriateness
are driven also by, for example, our sensitivities to the demands of
rational co-operation with our conversational partners. And it has
been though that, in one or another way, ordinary language
philosophers, including Austin, have been insensitive to the
additional parameters to which judgments of appropriateness are
beholden (for early attacks of this sort, see Ayer 1967 and Searle
1966). It is beyond the scope of this entry to attempt to assess
either the extent to which Austin should really be seen as a target of
such objections or, if he should, whether they demonstrate weaknesses
in his work. However, in pursuing any such assessment, it is important
to note that Austin's exploitation of ordinary language is never
driven by simple appeal to whether, in a situation considered as a
whole, we would take it to be simply appropriate or inappropriate to
use some sentence or other. Rather, Austin is—as we
are—sensitive to more fine-grained appraisals of uses of bits of
language and, when he judges that an utterance on an occasion would be
false or nonsensical, he intends that judgment to contrast with less
damaging negative appraisals—for example, about what it would be
merely inappropriate or impolite to say. Moreover, Austin is sensitive
to the specific features of situations upon which we base one or
another more fine-grained appraisal of uses of sentences. As he
stresses, “It takes two to make a truth” (1950a: 124 fn.1).
And Austin is sensitive to the details of both participants in that
and other forms of transaction between word and
world.[2]

The topic of this section is Austin's views about truth.
Austin's views about truth are scattered throughout his work, but
his most explicit discussion of the topic is in the paper
“Truth” (1950a) (see also 1953, 1954ms, 1956b,
1962b, 1962c). Amongst the distinctive claims Austin makes about
truth are the following:

(1)

The predicate “is true” has a descriptive function:
it serves to characterize the obtaining of a relation between
statements and facts (1950a: 117–121).

The relation between statements
and facts that underwrites the truth or falsity of statements is
itself underwritten by relations between sentences and types of fact,
and between episodes of stating and particular facts (1950a:
121–133).

Human judgment is involved in
determining whether a particular fact makes true a statement. And
judgment is involved in a way that is sensitive to the intents and
purposes with which a statement is made. For that reason, truth is
not a simple relation between types of sentences (given their
meanings) and particular facts. A pair of statements made using the
same sentence with respect to the same facts but on different
occasions—given different intents and purposes—might
differ in truth-value (1950a: 122 fn2; 1962a: 40–41, 62–77,
110–111; 1962b:
142–147).[3]

Despite (1), Austin appears to
endorse a form of
deflationism about truth—a view on which truth is a thin
or non-explanatory notion. According to this form of deflationism,
saying that a statement is true is just a way of saying that the
statement has one or another of a range of more specific positive
qualities—for example, that it is satisfactory, correct, fair,
etc. (1950: 130; 1956b: 250–251; 1957: 180).

Let's start with (1)–(3). Austin 1950a is ostensibly
responding to a proposal in Strawson 1949 according to which the
function of the predicate ‘is true’ is to facilitate the
performance of acts of affirmation or agreement, and not to describe
things—e.g., statements—as possessing the property of truth.
For short, Strawson claimed that ‘is true’ has a
performative rather than a descriptive function. And
he accused his opponents of committing the descriptive
fallacy: the alleged fallacy of treating expressions, or aspects
of the use of expressions, that really serve performative purposes as
having (only) a descriptive
purpose.[4]
One of Austin's aims was
to defend the view that the predicate ‘is true’ has a
descriptive function (perhaps in addition to its having one or more
performative functions). In pursuing that aim, Austin also made a
number of distinctive proposals about the descriptive function of the
truth
predicate.[5]

Let's turn, then, to the core of Austin's account of
truth. Austin presents his account of truth as an account of truth for
statements. However, ‘statement’ is at least two
ways ambiguous, covering both historical episodes in which something is
stated—what I'll refer to as statings—and
also the things or propositions that are stated therein—which
I'll refer to as what is stated. Austin isn't
especially careful about the distinction, but it's possible to
reconstruct much of what he says in a way that respects it (for
discussion of the distinction see e.g., Cartwright 1962).

Austin's primary interest appears to be the truth of
statings. He writes of ‘statement’ that it has
“the merit of clearly referring to the historic use of a sentence
by an utterer” (1950a: 121). However, statings are not ordinarily
said to be true or false, except derivatively insofar as what is stated
in them is true or false. Rather, statings are assessed as, for
example, correct or incorrect, appropriate or inappropriate, and so
forth. However, it is plausible that stating correctly is closely
associated with making a statement that is true. And Austin's
account can be understood as an account of the conditions in which
statings are such that what is stated in them is
true.[6]

Austin presents the core of his account of truth in the following
way:

When is a statement true? The temptation is to answer (at least if
we confine ourselves to ‘straightforward’ statements):
‘When it corresponds to the facts’. And as a piece of
standard English this can hardly be wrong. Indeed, I must confess I do
not really think it is wrong at all: the theory of truth is a series of
truisms. Still, it can at least be misleading. (1950a: 121)

The two obvious sources of potential misdirection in the formula
that Austin endorses here are its appeal to correspondence and
its appeal to
facts.[7]
Austin attempts to prevent our being misled by explaining how those
two appeals ought to be understood. Austin's focus in his
“Truth” (1950a) is mainly on the nature of
correspondence. He deals more fully with facts in his “Unfair to
Facts” (1954ms).

In giving an account of correspondence, Austin makes appeal to two
types of (what he calls) conventions
(as per (3)
above):[8]

Descriptive conventions. These correlate sentences
with types of situation, thing, event, etc., in the world.

The descriptive conventions associate sentences with (types
of) ways for things to be: ways for situations, things, events, etc. to
be. For instance, the sentence “The cat is on the mat” is
associated with a type of way for things to be in which the cat is on
the mat. A variety of different historic situations might be of that
type. For instance, one historic situation of that type might involve
Logos (Derrida's cat), while a different historic situation of
the same type might involve Nothing (Sartre's cat). Similarly,
cat-mat pairings that took place at different times would be different
historic situations or events and yet might be of the same type.

The demonstrative conventions, by contrast, associate
particular statings—themselves historic events—with some
amongst the accessible historic situations, things, events, etc.
Consider, for example, the following simplified case. There are two
accessible situations, one of which is of the cat-on-mat type and one
of which is of the dog-on-linoleum type. The descriptive conventions
governing the English sentence “The cat is on the mat” do
not, and cannot, determine which of the two accessible situations a
speaker aims to talk about on a particular occasion. In order to
achieve that, the speaker must find a way of making manifest that their
goal is to select, say, the dog-on-linoleum situation. They might
achieve this by, for example, their use on a particular occasion of the
present tense, or by pointing,
etc.
(1950a: 121–126).[10]

With this machinery in place, Austin continues:

A statement is said to be true when the historic state of affairs
[or e.g., situation, thing, event] to which it is correlated by the
demonstrative by the demonstrative conventions (the one to which it
‘refers’) is of a type [footnote omitted] with which the
sentence used in making it is correlated by the descriptive
conventions. (1950a: 122)

What does ‘is of a type with which’ mean? Austin expands
on his account in the omitted footnote:

‘Is of a type with which’ means ‘is sufficiently
like those standard states of affairs with which’. Thus, for a
statement to be true one state of affairs must be like certain
others, which is a natural relation, but also sufficiently
like to merit the same ‘description’, which is no longer a
purely natural relation. To say ‘This is red’ is not the
same as to say ‘This is like those’, nor even as to say
‘This is like those which were called red’. That things are
similar, or even ‘exactly’ similar, I may
literally see, but that they are the same I cannot literally
see—in calling them the same colour a convention is involved
additional to the conventional choice of the name to be given to the
colour which they are said to be. (1950a: 122 fn.2)

The English sentence “This is red” is correlated by the
descriptive conventions with a type of way for things to be: a type
instanced by all and only those historic situations or states of
affairs in which a selected thing is red. According to Austin, a
stating by use of that sentence would be correct if the thing selected
in the stating via the demonstrative conventions were sufficiently like
standard situations or states of affairs in which a selected thing is
red. So, we rely on the existence of a range of standard instances that
are assumed to be of the required type. We can see that the thing
selected in this stating, via the demonstrative conventions, is now in
various ways similar and dissimilar from those standard instances. The
question we need to answer is this: Is this thing of the same
type as the standard instances with respect to its colour? That is, is
it the same colour as they are? According to Austin, we cannot answer
that question simply by looking. In an at least attenuated sense we
must make a decision as to whether the present instance is, in relevant
respects, sufficiently similar to the standard instances as to
mandate treating it as of the very same
type.[11]

Notice that, on Austin's view, states of affairs (etc.) do not
per se mandate that they belong to one or another type. To
that extent, they do not alone determine which propositional statements
are true of them. The things to which true statings correspond, then,
are (in at least that sense) particulars
(see (2) above). The
things to which statings correspond, then, appear to be quite different
from facts as the latter are commonly understood by
philosophers. For facts are often thought of as
proposition-like—as exhaustively captured by instances of the
form “The fact that p”. And it seems that elements
of that type would mandate the correctness of one or another
classification. Austin's views about facts are developed a bit
more fully in his “Unfair to Facts” (1954ms). There Austin
makes clear, first, that he uses ‘facts’, with
etymological precedent, to speak of particulars. Second, Austin
sketches a view of propositional fact talk on which it is used as a
way of indirectly denoting particulars as the elements that make the
specified propositions true. However, Austin's basic account of truth
can for the most part be detached from his views about facts and
fact-talk.[12]

The role for human judgment or decision in mediating the
classification of particulars leaves open that their correct
classification as to type might vary depending on specific features of
the occasion for so classifying them (see (4) above).
It may be, for example, that for certain purposes an
historic state of affairs involving a rose is sufficiently like
standard situations involving red things as to warrant sameness of
classification, while for different purposes its likeness is
outweighed by its dissimilarities from the standard cases. Moreover,
what are counted as standard cases may vary with the purposes
operative in attempting to classify, and may shift as new cases come
to be counted as of a specific
type.[13]

The precise ways in which our statings depend for their correctness
or incorrectness on the facts can vary with variation in specific
features of the occasion, in particular with variation in the intents
and purposes of conversational participants. As Austin puts it,

It seems to be fairly generally realized nowadays that, if you just
take a bunch of sentences…impeccably formulated in some language
or other, there can be no question of sorting them out into those that
are true and those that are false; for (leaving out of account
so-called ‘analytic’ sentences) the question of truth and
falsehood does not turn only on what a sentence is, nor yet on
what it means, but on, speaking very broadly, the
circumstances in which it is uttered. Sentences as such are
not either true or false. (1962a: 110–111. See also 40–41,
65)

And the circumstances can matter in a variety of ways, not simply by
supplying, or failing to supply, an appropriate array of facts:

…in the case of stating truly or falsely, just as in the case
of advising well or badly, the intents and purposes of the utterance
and its context are important; what is judged true in a school book may
not be so judged in a work of historical research. Consider …
‘Lord Raglan won the battle of Alma’, remembering that Alma
was a soldier's battle if ever there was one and that Lord
Raglan's orders were never transmitted to some of his
subordinates. Did Lord Raglan then win the battle of Alma or did he
not? Of course in some contexts, perhaps in a school book, it is
perfectly justifiable to say so—it is something of an
exaggeration, maybe, and there would be no question of giving Raglan a
medal for it…‘Lord Raglan won the battle of Alma’ is
exaggerated and suitable to some contexts and not to others; it would
be pointless to insist on its [i.e., the sentence's]
truth or falsehood. (1962b: 143–144, interpolation added)

It's important here to separate two questions. First, is the
sentence “Lord Raglan won the battle of Alma”
true? Second, is what is stated in using that sentence on a
particular occasion, true? In order for the first question to get an
affirmative answer, every use of the sentence would have to
be—or issue in a statement that
is—true.[14]
But although the sentence can be used in a schoolbook to make a
statement that is true, it might also be used in a work of historical
research, or in support of Raglan's decoration, in making a false
statement. Hence, the sentence doesn't take the same truth-value
on every occasion: the sentence per se is neither
true nor false. By contrast, there is no reason to deny that the
things that are stated in using the sentence on occasions are true: in
particular, there is no reason to deny that what is stated by the
schoolbook occurrence of the sentence is true. So, the second question
can be given an affirmative answer, as long as we are willing to allow
that a sentence can be used to make different statements on different
occasions (see also Austin's discussion of ‘real’
in Sense and Sensibilia (1962a: 62–77) for an array of
relevant examples).

We should avoid a possible misunderstanding of Austin here. His
argument shows, at most, that whatever combines with the facts to
determine a particular truth-value varies from occasion to occasion.
That does nothing to dislodge the natural view that a sentence can
carry its meaning with it from occasion to occasion, and thus
possess a literal meaning. However, if we wish to retain that idea, we
must give up on the idea that sentence meaning simply combines with the
facts that are being spoken about to determine truth-value: we must
reject the idea that sentence meanings determine truth-conditions.
Plausibly, we should also give up the idea that meaning alone
determines what is stated (at least insofar as the latter determines
truth-conditions). In taking this line, we would reject views of
meaning according to which it is given by appeal
to
truth-conditions.[15]

Austin's account gives rise to the possibility of utterances
in which no truth-evaluable statement is produced:

Suppose that we confront ‘France is hexagonal’ with the
facts, in this case, I suppose, with France, is it true or false? Well,
if you like, up to a point; of course I can see what you mean by saying
that it is true for certain intents and purposes. It is good enough for
a top-ranking general, perhaps, but not for a geographer… How
can one answer this question, whether it is true or false that France
is hexagonal? It is just rough, and that is the right and final answer
to the question of the relation of ‘France is hexagonal’ to
France. It is a rough description; it is not a true or a false one.
(1962a: 143)

What Austin characterises in his final denial is the
sentence “France is hexagonal”, in relation to
France. He needn't, and doesn't, deny that on occasion, for
particular intents and purposes, one might use the sentence to
state a truth. However, he suggests that, in some cases, the
circumstances of utterance may be such that no truth-evaluable
statement is made by the use of a sentence.

Suppose, for example, that someone uttered “France is
hexagonal” out of the blue, without making manifest any intents
and purposes. In that case, there would be nothing to go on, in seeking
to establish whether the utterance was true or false, other than the
words used, given their meanings. But those words might have been used
to make a variety of statements, statements whose truth or falsehood
depends on the facts in a variety of ways. Hence, unless we are willing
to allow that the utterance is both true and false, we should withhold
that mode of assessment: although such an utterance would involve a
perfectly meaningful sentence, it would fail to be either true
or false. Austin thought that our uses of words are always liable to
that sort of failure, especially when we are doing philosophy. When
used in cases that are out of the ordinary, or in the absence of the
background required to sustain the statement of truths or falsehoods,
words might—in that sense—fail us.

Austin makes no claims to generality for the account of truth that
he sketches. However, it's natural to wonder to what extent the
account can naturally be extended in order to take in types of
statement that he doesn't explicitly attempt to bring within its
purview. Potential pressure points here include statements whose
expression involves negation (see 1950a: 128–129, 129 fn.1),
quantification (see 1962b: 144), or conditionals, and statements of
necessary truths. The three main options open to the defender of Austin
here are the following. First, an attempt might be made to bring some
cases within the purview of a natural generalization of Austin's
account (see, for example, Warnock 1989: 56–61). Second, it
might be allowed that some such cases require distinctive treatment,
but argued that they can still be connected with the account Austin
offers as further species of the truth-genus. Third, an attempt might
be made to argue that some such cases are so distinctive that the forms
of positive appraisal that are appropriate to them are not really forms
of appraisal as to
truth.[16]

Let's turn to (5), the question of the extent to which Austin
endorses a deflationary account of truth. The promiscuity of the
classifier “deflationist” has a tendency to render the
question difficult to discuss in a useful way. However, we can at least
consider some ways in which Austin might be thought to give an
explanatory role to truth, or to deny it such a role. It's clear
that Austin wishes to reject Strawson's very strong form of
deflationism, according to which the function of truth is exhaustively
performative: saying that a statement is true amounts, precisely, to
endorsing that statement oneself. Moreover, there is no sign that
Austin thinks an account can be given of the expression of statements
by statings that isn't bound up with consideration of the
conditions in which their stating would be subject to one or another
form of positive appraisal—at the most general level,
consideration of their correctness-conditions. However, Austin often
characterizes truth and falsity themselves as, in effect, mere labels
for positive and negative poles, respectively, in a variety of more
specific forms of appraisal.

We become obsessed with ‘truth’ when discussing
statements, just as we become obsessed with ‘freedom’ when
discussing conduct. So long as we think that what has always and alone
to be decided is whether a certain action was done freely or was not,
we get nowhere: but so soon as we turn instead to the numerous other
adverbs used in the same connexion (‘accidentally’,
‘unwillingly’, ‘inadvertently’, &c.),
things become easier, and we come to see that no concluding inference
of the form ‘Ergo, it was done freely (or not freely)’ is
required. Like freedom, truth is a bare minimum or an illusory ideal
(the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about, say, the
battle of Waterloo or the Primavera). (1950a: 130; see also
1956b: 250–251, 1957: 180)

Austin's idea here seems to be the following. There are
numerous specific forms of positive appraisal that we employ with
respect to statings: they might be fair, reasonable, accurate, precise,
adequate, satisfactory and so forth. (Recall that Austin would have
taken each form of assessment to be occasion-bound: a matter, for
example, of what would be fair and reasonable to judge on this
particular occasion.) In saying that what is stated in a stating is
true, we are in effect saying that the stating meets the
‘bare minimum’ condition of being susceptible to one or
another of those specific forms of positive appraisal. It's
consistent with this type of view that our conception of the natures of
what we state, and of how our statings come to be expressions of those
things, is bound up with our conception of the conditions in which our
statings, and what we thereby state, are susceptible to one or another
form of positive appraisal. To that extent, it differs from some
stronger forms of deflationism on which no truth-related mode of
positive appraisal plays a non-derivative explanatory role. Moreover,
the view can take more or less radical forms. Its most radical form
treats truth as a mere disjunction of the more specific modes of
positive appraisal, with no uniform underlying commonality amongst
those specific modes. That view would be a distinctive form of
deflationism about truth, since it would reject the idea that truth
per se plays an essential role in explanation. Its less
radical form allows that truth might impose a uniform necessary
condition on the specific modes of positive appraisal, and thereby play
an essential role, through its government of the specific modes, in the
explanation of what is stated in statings. The latter form of view
wouldn't count as an interesting form of deflationism,
although it might well be an interesting position in its own right.

Austin discusses an important range of ways in which assessment as to
truth can cover a variety of more fine-grained modes of appraisal in
his “How to Talk” (1953). See also the discussions of this
paper in Chisholm 1963 and Warnock 1989: 47–56.

In this section, we'll consider some aspects of Austin's
treatment of speech acts—things done with words (the main
sources here are: 1962b, 1956b, and 1963; see also 1946:
97–103, 1950a: 130–133, 1953). The topics we'll
consider are the following.

(1)

In his work on speech acts, Austin presents a
different reason for why sentences, given their meanings, do not
combine with the facts to determine truth-values. The second reason is
based on the fact that any sentence can be used in performing a
variety of linguistic acts. Although in stating, we typically produce
statements that are assessable as true or false, in performing other
linguistic acts, we need not produce things that are assessable in
that way. The second reason depends, then, on two sub-claims: first,
that whether a sentence is used on an occasion to make
a statement—more generally, something
truth-assessable—is dependent on more than just what it means;
second, that some uses of sentences to perform linguistic acts other
than the making of statements are not properly assessable as true or
false.

Connected with (1) is Austin's
discussion of a distinction between constative
utterances—broadly, utterances of a type suitable to be
appraised as to truth—and performative
utterances—broadly, utterances that are suitable only for
other forms of appraisal (1962b: 1–93).

In addition to discussing the
putative constative-performative distinction, Austin sketches a
distinction amongst speech act types, between locutionary
acts, illocutionary acts, and
perlocutionary acts—broadly, the distinction between
saying anything at all, saying something with a specific force (e.g.,
making a statement, asking a question, making a request), and the
further effects of saying something with a specific force (e.g.,
getting an audience to believe something, getting them to tell you
something, or getting them to do what you request). The need to draw
such a distinction is now very widely accepted and probably amounts to
Austin's central contribution to more recent work (1962b:
83–164).

Austin makes some cryptic
suggestions about the wider significance of his discussion of topic
(3), concerning their bearing on, for example, what he calls
“the true/false fetish” and “the value/fact
fetish” (1962b: 148–164).

A topic that has figured in some recent discussions, but that we
won't discuss here, is this:

In the course of discussing his
main topics, Austin sometimes makes use of a distinction
between serious and
non-serious uses of language, and suggests that non-serious
uses of language are derivative from serious uses. (Roughly, the
distinction is a generalisation of distinctions between genuine
assertions and mock assertions in fiction or on the stage. See e.g.,
Austin 1962b: 104.) Jacques Derrida challenged the standing of the
distinction and the priority that Austin seemed to accord to some of
what he counted as serious uses. John Searle responded to Derrida and
the issue has become a source of some attempts at engagement between
those sympathetic to Searle's more “Analytic”
approaches to issues in this area and those sympathetic to more
“Continental” approaches. (See Derrida 1977 and Searle
1977. For recent discussion of aspects of the controversy see de
Gaynesford 2009, Moore 2000, Richmond 1996.)

Austin presents the second reason for why sentences do not conspire
with the facts to determine truth-values in considering whether there
is a useful distinction to be drawn between (indicative) sentences that
are used to make statements—which Austin labels
constatives—and sentences that are useable in the
performance of some act—which Austin labels
performatives (or sometimes performatory)
(topic (2) above).[17]
Austin's opening list of examples of putative
performatives includes: “I take … to be my lawfully wedded
…”—as uttered in the course of the marriage
ceremony; “I name this ship the Queen
Elizabeth”—as uttered when smashing a bottle against
the stern; “I give and bequeath my watch to my
brother”—as occurring in a will; “I bet you sixpence
it will rain tomorrow” (1962b: 5). About these examples, Austin
writes:

In these examples it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of
course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my
doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing…[fn.
Still less anything that I have already done or have yet to
do.]…or to state that I am doing it. None of the utterances
cited is either true or false: I assert this as obvious and do not
argue it. (1962b: 6)

Austin is sometimes read as seeking to defend this view of
performatives. However, four features of his presentation suggest that
his view is not so straightforward. First, Austin presents the issue as
concerning the classification by use of utterances of types of
sentence, and we have already seen that he is in general sceptical
about alleged associations between sentences and their occasional uses.
Second, Austin fails here, and elsewhere, to offer serious arguments
for his assertion that none of the cited utterances is either true or
false. Third, Austin's assertion is made using the apparently
performative form, “I assert … ”—a form that
appears, moreover, to falsify the generalisation that performatives
lack truth-values. Finally, Austin issues the following warning in a
footnote, two pages earlier: “Everything said in these sections
is provisional, and subject to revision in the light of later
sections” (1962b: 4 fn.1).

Austin goes on to discuss two apparently quite different modes of
assessment for utterances of the two apparently different types.
Constatives, as already noted, are assessed along the dimension of
truth and falsehood. By contrast, performatives are assessed along
dimensions of happiness and unhappiness, or
felicity and infelicity. Taking the example of an
utterance of “I take … to be my lawfully wedded …
”, and simplifying Austin's discussion, there are two main
sorts of unhappiness, or infelicity, to which this performative is
liable. First, there are misfires:

…if we…utter the formula incorrectly, or if…we
are not in a position to do the act because we are…married
already, or it is the purser and not the captain who is conducting the
ceremony, then the act in question, …marrying, is not
successfully performed at all, …[it] is not achieved. (1962b:
15–16)

Second, there are abuses: in these cases, the act is
performed, but insincerely, perhaps for example in instituting a
marriage of convenience.

It's important to see that, even if it were true, in general,
that some things done using performatives—e.g., marrying, naming,
bequeathing, and betting—are neither true nor false, but rather
are subject to assessment as happy or unhappy, it would not follow that
truth is out of the picture. That would depend, not only on the basic
claim that actions of those types per se are not true or
false, but also on the claim that particular actions of those types are
not also of other types that are assessable as true or false.
And Austin recognised that actions can be of more than one type (or,
perhaps, that distinct actions might be performed simultaneously):

To say that I believe you ‘is’ on occasion to accept
your statement; but it is also to make an assertion, which is not made
by the strictly performatory utterance ‘I accept your
statement’. (1950a: 133)

In the examples that Austin cites, things are done that are not
assessable as true or false—marrying, naming, betting, etc. But
as Austin points out, those examples might also involve other things
being done—e.g., the making of statements—that are, or
involve things that are, assessable as true or false. However, even
though this undermines Austin's provisional characterisation of
performatives, the possibility that we might sometimes do more than one
thing in using a performative puts pressure on the idea that there is a
simple connection between sentences and the various things we do in
using them.

I've suggested that Austin's view of the putative
distinction between performatives and constatives is less
straightforward than it might at first seem. And the structure of
Austin (1962b) bears out that assessment. Although much of the book
seems to be devoted to pursuit of a distinction between performatives
and constatives, none of the attempts succeeds. It is possible, but
implausible, that in the course of the lectures Austin found that he
was unable to draw a distinction that he thought should be drawn. A
more plausible interpretation is that Austin's purpose is not to
draw such a distinction. Rather it is to argue—through the
failures of various attempts to draw the distinction—that there
is no such simple distinction—no sorting of sentences into those
apt for performative, and those apt for constative, use.

Austin argues against the distinction by appeal to the fact that the
same forms of assessment are applicable to utterances apparently of
both sorts:

…unhappiness…seems to characterize both kinds of
utterance, not merely the performative; and…the requirement of
conforming or bearing some relation to the facts, different in
different cases, seems to characterize performatives… (1962b:
91)

Attempts to make a statement are liable both to misfires and abuses.
For example, an attempt to make a statement using “France is
hexagonal” might misfire if there were no such country as France,
or (as discussed above) if no suitable intents and purposes were
manifest (1962b: 47–52). And an attempt might be an abuse if the
speaker failed to believe that France was hexagonal. Attempts at
performative utterance are liable to assessment either in terms of
truth or falsehood, or in terms similarly dependent on conformity with
the facts: my utterance of “I warn you that the bull is about to
charge” may be liable to criticism as mistaken rather
than unhappy if the bull is not about to charge (1962b: 55). More
generally, it is often impossible to decide, just from the words a
speaker uses, whether their utterance is susceptible to one or another
form of assessment. And there are cases like “I state that
…” which seem to satisfy all formal and lexical
requirements for being performative, and yet are used in utterances
“…which surely are the making of statements, and
surely are essentially true or false” (1962b: 91).
(Austin's ideas here also bear on topic (4) above.)

From the wreckage of the initial distinction, Austin assembles a new
model (topic (3) above). The new model is founded on distinctions
among various kinds of thing speakers do—various acts
they perform—when they produce an utterance.

The locutionary act: the production of an utterance that
can be classified by its phonetic, grammatical, and lexical
characteristics, up to sentence meaning (the phatic act). It
is also the performance of an act that can be classified by its
content (the rhetic act)—a feature
distinctively of acts of speech. If I promise that I'll be
home for dinner and then promise that I'll work
late, my actions are instances of two different locutionary acts:
one with the content that I'll be home for dinner, and one with
the content that I'll work late (1962b: 94–98).

The illocutionary act: an act classifiable not only by its
content—as with the locutionary act—but also by its
force (stating, warning, promising, etc.). If I
promise that I'll be home for dinner and later
state that I'll be home for dinner, my actions are
instances of the same locutionary act: both actions involve the content
that I'll be home for dinner. However, my actions are instances
of different illocutionary acts: one has the force of a promise, while
the other has the force of a statement (1962b: 98–101).

The perlocutionary act: an act classifiable by its “
… consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions
of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons …
”. If I warn that the ice is thin, and so perform one
illocutionary act, I may thereby perform a variety of perlocutionary
acts: I may persuade someone to avoid it, or
encourage someone to take a risk, and so forth (1962b:
101).

Austin's interest in the types of act so distinguished was
“…essentially to fasten on the second, illocutionary act
and contrast it with the other two…” (1962b: 103). What
did Austin think was important about the illocutionary act? And what
did he think were the dangers inherent in failing to mark it off from
the other types?

Austin appears to have thought that the various modes of assessment
that he discusses—e.g., true/false, happy/unhappy—apply most
fundamentally to the illocutionary act, rather than the
locutionary or the perlocutionary
act.[18]
One point is that Austin thought that philosophers
have had a tendency to view some assessments as to happiness (or
felicity) as really applying to perlocutionary acts, so as not bearing
on the specifically linguistic things that speakers are up to. Another
point—and perhaps the point of primary importance—is that
Austin thought that philosophers have had a tendency to view
assessments as to truth as applying most fundamentally to locutionary
acts. Moreover, he thought that philosophers had conceived locutionary
acts, not as abstractions from illocutionary acts, but rather as things
that might be done without any illocutionary purpose, just by virtue of
the linguistic expressions employed or their meanings. By contrast,
Austin held that locutionary acts are abstracted from instances of
illocutionary acts, and that assessment as to truth is directed most
fundamentally to the illocutionary act. (We'll consider below a
stronger and a weaker reading of the idea that assessment as to truth
applies most fundamentally to the illocutionary act.)

For Austin, then, assessment as to truth is of a piece with various
forms of assessment as to happiness, etc., and like those forms it is
the assessment of an act with respect to its goodness or badness. Thus
Austin's discussion of illocutionary acts is bound up with his
other discussions of the ways in which assessment of utterances as to
truth is dependent upon specific features of the circumstances of
utterance. He writes:

The truth or falsity of statements is affected by what they leave
out or put in and by their being misleading, and so on. Thus, for
example, descriptions, which are said to be true or false or, if you
like, are ‘statements’, are surely liable to these
criticisms, since they are selective and uttered for a purpose. It is
essential to realize that ‘true’ and false’, like
‘free’ and ‘unfree’, do not stand for anything
simple at all; but only for a general dimension of being a
right and proper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing, in these
circumstances, to this audience, for these purposes and with these
intentions. (1962b: 144–145)

According to Austin, there is more involved in any such assessment
than a simple comparison of requirements imposed by linguistic meaning
with the facts. Reflection on the assessment of actions in which we
speak and the speech acts that classify them indicates two things:
first, the distinction between assessment as to happiness and
assessment as to truth is ultimately unprincipled; and, second, some
mixture of various types of assessment applies to all, or nearly all,
utterances. These ideas appear to be the basis for a cryptic claim of
Austin's (mentioned above as topic (4)). Exploiting the various
modes of appraisal to distinguish five very general classes of speech
act verbs, Austin writes that

They are…quite enough to play Old Harry with two fetishes
which I admit to an inclination to play Old Harry with, viz. (1) the
true/false fetish, (2) the value/fact fetish. (1962b: 151)

Austin's cryptic suggestion appears to be to the effect that,
in one or another way, classifications of utterances along the
true-false dimension, or according to whether they are expressions of
fact or expressions of value, is—for at least some
purposes—too crude. The suggestion is susceptible of a weaker and
a stronger reading. On the weaker reading, the suggestion is to the
effect that, when the assessment of an utterance is at issue,
it is essential to consider the force or forces that attach to the
illocutionary act or acts thereby performed. Since various such acts
may have been performed, and since assessment of each act involves
consideration of a mix of facts and values, there is no clean way of
sorting utterances on the basis either of whether or not their primary
mode of assessment is on the true-false dimension, or of whether their
primary function is the expression of fact, rather than the expression
of value. That leaves open that, with respect to at least some speech
acts, a locutionary core—a proposition, or propositions, or
propositional-like element—may be assessed in a way that makes no
reference to force, for example, along the true-false dimension. On the
stronger reading, the claim would be that it is not possible to detach
a locutionary core from the force with which it is expressed in such a
way that that core can be assessed without reference to force. On its
stronger reading, Austin's suggestion would have to contend with
an aspect of what is known as the Frege-Geach problem: the
challenge of explaining logical connections amongst speech acts with
different forces where those connections appear to depend upon their
sharing (elements of) a locutionary core (see Geach 1965).

Austin's main discussions of knowledge and perception take place in
“Other Minds” (1946) and Sense and Sensibilia
(1962a). (See also “Unfair to Facts” (1954ms), which
overlaps with parts of the lecture series on which Sense and
Sensibilia was based that are excised from the book, and
“Ifs and Cans” (1956a:
230)).[19]
Stated more baldly than would have been
acceptable to Austin, and reconstructing slightly, his distinctive
views in this area include the following.

Knowledge is a basic form of
apprehension of how things are, rather than a hybrid of belief
conjoined with additional conditions. Knowing provides a sort of
guarantee about one's environment. That is, in at least some sense,
the following is true: “If you know, you can't be wrong.”
What a subject's knowledge guarantees can include truths about the
environment that are independent of the subject (1946: 77–78,
84–103; 1962a: 104–131). Austin's commitment to (1) aligns
him with the tradition of “Oxford Realism” (see Kalderon
and Travis 2013; Marion 2000a,b, 2009; Martin ms (Other
Internet Resources); Williamson 2000).

Like all other human capacities,
human judgmental capacities are inherently limited and fallible. The
capacities are inherently limited in that there are bound to exist
cases with respect to which they are insufficiently reliable to give
rise to knowledge. And they are inherently fallible in that, even in
the most propitious circumstances, it is possible that their exercise
is unsuccessful. (The risk of fallibility is liable to increase, of
course, as the capacities approach the limits within which their
application is reliable.) (1946: 90–97; 1962a:
104–131)

The fact that capacities that are
essentially involved in the acquisition of knowledge are inherently
limited and fallible is consistent with their operating successfully
in a variety of circumstances so as to give rise to knowledge (1946:
83–103; 1962a: 104–131).

A consequence of (3) and (4) is that foundationalism is
undercut: there are no foundational claims that are especially
infallible; and there are no non-foundational claims that are
distinctively fallible. It is possible for our judgmental capacities to
misfire with respect to any subject matter, including e.g., our own
feelings or experiences. And it's possible for their exercise to
be sufficiently reliable to give rise to knowledge about ordinary
matters, e.g., that there is a pig before one.

In order for exercises of
capacities to make perception-based judgments to sustain knowledge
about the subject-independent environment, perception must put the
perceiver in contact with that environment, rather than being
restricted in its reach to
sense-data. (1946: 86–97, 1962a: 10.) Again, this
commitment aligns Austin with “Oxford Realism” (see Hinton
1973; Kalderon and Travis 2013; Marion 2000a,b, 2009; Martin ms
(Other Internet Resources), 1997; Snowdon 1981).

Some standard forms of argument
that perception cannot put the perceiver in the required type of
contact with their environment—arguments that have been
presented in support of the claim that our basic form of perceptual
contact is with sense-data (e.g., the so-called ‘argument from
illusion’)—are, at best, unconvincing
(1962a: passim).

Three further side claims that have assumed some importance in
recent work are the following.

Connected with (7), Austin sketches a view on which claims to
the effect that someone knows something can serve as
assurances, on the basis of which others are entitled to act,
form beliefs, or claim to know (1946: 97–103).

Austin sketches a view on which
utterances of the form “I know that such-and-such” serve
a performative and
not a descriptive function. According to this view,
the function of “I know” is very similar to the function of
“I promise”: both serve as ways of giving one's word,
the first (typically) about how things are, the second (typically)
about how one intends them to be (1946: 97–103).

Let's begin with some of what Austin says in support of (1).
In his “Other Minds” (1946), Austin sketches a distinction
between knowing and believing through appeal to the different kinds of
challenges that are appropriate to claims to know versus claims to
believe. First, Austin points out that one who claims to know may be
challenged to explain
how they know, while someone who claims to believe may be
challenged to explain why they believe. The consequences of
failing adequately to meet those challenges are also different: in the
first case, the consequences might include that the subject does
not know; in the second, the consequence might include, not
the subject doesn't believe, but that they
oughtn't to believe. Later, Austin indicates a further
basis for the distinction between knowing and believing:

…saying ‘I know’…is not saying
‘I have performed a specially striking feat of cognition,
superior, in the same scale as believing and being sure, even to being
quite sure’: for there is nothing in that scale superior
to being quite sure. (1946: 99)

Importantly, and moving on to claim (2), Austin holds that knowledge
is the upshot of the successful exercise of judgmental
capacities—which he thinks of as essentially language
involving—in appropriate circumstances: the successful exercise
of (judgmental) acumen given (perception- or testimony-based)
opportunity. The following two passages are central to
understanding Austin's views in this area:

Any description of a taste or sound or smell (or colour) or of a
feeling, involves (is) saying that it is like one or some that we have
experienced before: any descriptive word is classificatory, involves
recognition and in that sense memory, and only when we use such words
(or names or descriptions, which come down to the same) are we knowing
anything, or believing anything. But memory and recognition are often
uncertain and unreliable. (1946: 92).

…sensa [the things we sense or perceive] are dumb, and only
previous experience enables us to identify them. If we choose
to say that they ‘identify themselves’ (and certainly
‘recognizing’ is not a highly voluntary act of ours), then
it must be admitted that they share the birthright of all speakers,
that of speaking unclearly and untruly. (1946: 97)

We perceive various things, features, events, and states of affairs.
The things we perceive are not presented to us as already classified
into types. Yet propositional knowledge essentially involves
classification: for example, we know that that thing is a pig.
In order to know, we must exercise judgmental capacities, taking stands
with respect to the ways the things, features, events, and states of
affairs are. We must classify the elements into types based on their
similarities with elements that we have already classified into types.
(Notice that Austin's view that these elements are particulars,
articulated in his “Truth” (1950a) and “Unfair to
Facts” (1954ms), figures essentially here.)

Returning to (1), let's consider what Austin says about the
conditions in which a subject would fail to know.
Austin's discussion is haunted by the following condition:
“If I know, I can't be wrong”. He
never quite endorses the condition. He admits at one point that its
third person counterpart makes sense, but characterizes the
sense it makes by appeal to a prohibition on saying “I
know it is so, but I may be wrong” (1946: 98).

It's clear that Austin would reject the claim that it is a
necessary condition on knowing that it be impossible for one
to have been wrong—impossible, that is, for one to have exercised
the same capacities in the same circumstances and to have judged
incorrectly. For given that he holds that judgmental capacities are
inherently fallible ((3) above), it would follow that we can never know
anything.

The human intellect and senses are, indeed, inherently
fallible and delusive, but not inveterately so. Machines are
inherently liable to break down, but good machines don't (often).
It is futile to embark on a ‘theory of knowledge’ which
denies this liability: such theories constantly end up by admitting the
liability after all, and denying the existence of
‘knowledge’. (1946: 98)

What Austin says here is consistent with the operation of the
capacities being reliable in some circumstances, and with their
reliable operation being such as to give rise to knowledge. So it is
open to Austin to hold a view on which knowledge requires that the
particular exercises of the capacity to judge on which they are
based couldn't have occurred and yet the output judgment be
mistaken. And it is open to him to hold that if the exercise of
judgmental capacities is to give rise to knowledge, those capacities
must be reliable in the circumstances in which they are
exercised and given the way they are exercised on that occasion (e.g.,
carefully). However, Austin doesn't make fully explicit that his
view about knowledge includes either component. And some of what he
says—especially in discussion of his performative proposal about
the use of ‘I know’—is in tension with the first
claim, on which knowing is incompatible with being
mistaken.[20]
(It's possible that Austin viewed his “Ifs and Cans”
(1956a) discussion of abilities as providing further illumination
concerning the proper understanding of the formula “If one
knows, one can't be wrong”.)

One potential consequence of Austin's account concerns
foundationalism. Foundationalism typically involves the following three
claims. First, many of the ordinary judgments that we make—for
example, judgments to the effect that there is a pig here—are
inherently risky in the following sense. It's possible for us to
make such judgments mistakenly, even in cases in which we operate as
carefully as possible. Second, some of the judgments we make, or could
make, are not inherently risky: for example, where we are careful only
to judge about how things presently appear to us, the judgments we make
carry no risk of error. Third, then, if our aim is to achieve absolute
security, we should avoid judgments of the first sort except insofar as
they are securely based upon judgments of the second sort. (On one view
of this type, the first sort of judgment would be taken to provide
evidence on which judgments of the second sort are based.)
Austin's account undermines the first two components of this
view. The first component is undermined because, although it is always
possible to judge incorrectly, there are ordinary cases in
which our judgments about our environment are, in fact, absolutely
secure ((4) above):

…if I watch or some time an animal a few feet in front of me,
in a good light, if I prod it perhaps, and sniff, and take note of the
noises it makes, I may say, ‘That's a pig’; and this
too will be ‘incorrigible’, nothing could be produced that
would show that I had made a mistake…if the animal then emerges
and stands there plainly in view, there is no longer any question of
collecting evidence; its coming into view doesn't provide me with
more evidence that it's a pig, I can now just see that
it is, the question is settled. (1962a: 114–115)

The second component is undermined because there is no type
of judgment, and no type of subject matter, with respect to
which error is impossible ((3) above). In order to
have propositional knowledge even about what I am experiencing right
now, I must classify it together with other things of the same
type. And that requires the exercise of capacities that are inherently
fallible: I may not have had enough experiences of things of the same
sort to classify this one securely; I may not have attended to what I
am experiencing with sufficient care; I may fail adequately to
remember similar things that I experienced earlier; and so forth
(1946: 90–97; 1962a: 104–131).

Ordinary challenges to judgments or claims, including claims to
know, are sometimes invitations to detail our
credentials—our possession of appropriate acumen in
making judgments of the type in question. Sometimes, however, they are
invitations to detail our facts—the features of the
circumstance that figure in our judging in the way that we do. For
example, we might claim to know that that presented thing is a
goldfinch “by the shape of its head”. If we were to detail
our facts in that sort of way, then we might be open to further
challenge: someone might claim that that's not enough of
a basis on which to judge that the presented thing is a goldfinch. In
addition to emphasizing the role of special acumen in this type of
case—not just anyone can tell a goldfinch by the shape of its
head—Austin makes two important claims about such potential
challenges to our facts. First, Austin claims that, in order for such a
challenge to be appropriate, the challenger must have in mind some more
or less definite lack, for example by pointing out that birds other
than goldfinches have heads of that shape. Second, Austin writes:

Enough is enough: it doesn't mean everything. Enough means
enough to show that (within reason, and for present intents and
purposes) it ‘can't’ be anything else, there is no
room for an alternative, competing description of it. It does not mean,
for example, enough to show it isn't a stuffed
goldfinch. (1946: 84.)

There are at least three, non-exclusive ways of reading
Austin's claim here. The first is as the claim that what suffices
for this here to be a goldfinch may not be enough with respect
to anything in any circumstance. There may be other birds, or other
things, with heads of the same shape. However, we might still know full
well that there are no such birds, and no such things, here; or we may
know enough about this thing to know it isn't a bird of that
sort, or one of those other things, even though we haven't
specified how we know in answer to the initial challenge. That is, we
may know that this isn't a stuffed goldfinch—given
the rest of what we know, and the circumstances in which we
judge—even though what we explicitly point to in answer to
challenges doesn't alone rule out the possibility. The second way
of reading Austin here is as allowing that we can know that this is a
goldfinch, even though we know that if it's a stuffed goldfinch,
then it is not a goldfinch, and we don't know that it isn't
a stuffed goldfinch. We are entitled—either in general, or in
circumstances of this sort—to assume or rely upon its not being a
stuffed goldfinch, even though that is something we can't rule
out and don't know (see Kaplan 2011 for development of the
second way of reading Austin's views in this area). The third way
of reading the passage is as claiming that the range of
possibilities can vary from occasion to occasion for judging
or claiming that one knows that this is a goldfinch. On the third
reading, it might be impossible, on this occasion, for the
presented thing to be a stuffed goldfinch, even though there are other
occasions on which it would be a possibility. Hence, our facts do not
need to foreclose on that possibility on this occasion, although there
might be other occasions on which our facts would need to do so.
(Travis 2005 develops the third approach. See Millar 2005 for
objections.)

Let's turn, then, to (7)–(9), focusing
attention on (9), the view that utterances of the
form “I know that such-and-such” serve a performative and
not a descriptive function. This is puzzling for at least two reasons:
first, the claim that “I know” lacks a descriptive
function is apt to seem obviously false; and second, it is unclear
what, if any, function the claim has in Austin's account as a
whole.

The main focus of objection to Austin here isn't the claim
that “I know that such-and-such” can, on occasion, serve
distinctive performative functions. Rather, the concern with
Austin's proposal is focused on two more specific claims. First,
it is focused on the claim that “I know that such-and-such”
always and only serves a distinctive performative function and so is
never at the service of self-description. Second, it is focused
on the claim that, in cases in which “I know that
such-and-such” is used to serve a performative function, neither
the felicity conditions of using the sentence in that way, nor the
truth of what, if anything, one thereby states, depend in turn on
whether the speaker knows that such-and-such.

Austin is misled here, I think, due to three factors. First, he is
misled by similarities between saying “I know that
such-and-such” and saying “I promise that
such-and-such” or “I swear that such-and-such”. But
the cases are importantly different. For example, unlike the case of
promising, in which saying “I promise…” in
appropriate circumstances makes it so that one has promised…,
saying “I know that such-and-such” does not make it so
that one knows. Now, as Austin later saw, it is possible to develop an
account on which saying “I know that such-and-such” can
serve more than one purpose and so can function well with respect to
one such purpose while functioning poorly with respect to others (see
e.g., 1950a: 133 and 1962b). Accordingly, it would be possible to
develop a view on which, for example, saying “I know that
such-and-such” in cases in which one does not know
would be improper qua statement (since saying it doesn't
remove the deficit by making it so that one knows), while properly
serving the purpose of giving an audience one's assurance. However,
and this is the second reason for which Austin is misled, he had not
in “Other Minds” (1946) yet attained the later perspective
on which that is a clear possibility. Since he nonetheless believes
that “I know that such-and-such” serves purposes other
than statement making, he is forced to efface its statement-making
function. Finally, and more speculatively, it seems that Austin is
misled due to his attempting to build into his account a response to a
doctrine, common to his Oxford Realist predecessors Cook Wilson and
Prichard, according to which whether one knows or merely believes
something is transparent to one. (For discussion of that feature of
Cook Wilson's and Prichard's views, see Kalderon and Travis
forthcoming and Travis 2005.) Although Austin rejects the letter of
the doctrine, he retains its spirit in attempting to provide an
account on which avowals of the form “I know that
such-and-such” can never be false. (For further discussion of
Austin's performative proposal, see Warnock 1989: 24–33, Lawlor
2013.)

Let's turn now to Austin's views specifically about
perception ((5) and (6) above). Once we have detailed the facts on
which a perception-based judgment of ours relies, a more general
challenge arises concerning our access to those facts. In order to
exploit the bird's head shape as the basis for our judgment that
it is a goldfinch, it is arguable that we must be able to see (or
perhaps feel) the bird and its shape. On some views of perception,
however, birds and their shapes are not amongst the things that one can
perceive. Austin's main aim in Sense &
Sensibilia is to undermine considerations that have been offered
in favour of the general doctrine that, as he puts it,

Central to those considerations are those organized by versions of
what is known as the argument from illusion
((6) above).[21]
The version
of the argument that Austin criticizes can be reconstructed as follows.
(i) There are cases of illusion in which we have a sensory experience
as of seeing something of some sort with specific features but in which
nothing has those specific features. This might be because, although we
experience something of the sort in question, the thing we experience
lacks the features in question; or it might be because we don't
experience a thing of the sort in question at all. (ii) In those cases,
there must be something we experience that has the features in
question. Call the things we experience in such cases
sense-data. (iii) Since the cases in which we experience
sense-data include cases in which no material things of the sort in
question, or with the features in question, are experienced, it follows
that sense-data are not (in general) material things, or elements in
the environment independent of the individual experiencer. It follows
that, in the cases in question, we experience things (or
directly experience things) that are distinct from material
things and we do not thereby experience (or directly
experience) material things. (iv) Now it is a general principle about
experiences that if we cannot discriminate the objects
of two experiences on the basis of introspection, then those experiences
must have objects of the same sort. Hence, if one experience has only sense-data as its objects,
and not material things, and a second experience has as its objects
something that we cannot discriminate on the basis of introspection
from the objects of the first experience, then the second experience
also has sense-data rather than material things as its objects. (v)
Since every experience stands in the required relation to an experience
with only sense-data as its objects, every experience has sense-data
rather than material things as its objects. Hence, we never
experience—or never directly experience—material
things

Austin objects to every step in the argument just reconstructed.
Amongst other complaints, he argues that key terms in the argument have
not been properly defined or explained—for instance,
“material thing” and “sense-data” (1962a: 4,
7–14, 55), and “directly” (1962a: 14–19). And
he objects to the general principle, to which appeal was made in (iv),
pointing out that there are no grounds for thinking that we cannot have
experiences with different kinds of object that we nonetheless
can't discriminate on the basis of introspection. For instance, we might
experience a bar of soap that looks just like a lemon, and be in a
position where we couldn't discriminate the soap from the lemon
on the basis of introspection. Nonetheless, we would hold that the two
experiences have different kinds of objects
(1962a:
50–52).[22]
However, what are perhaps his most important complaints target (i) and
(ii) by exploiting the distinction, initially articulated in
“Other Minds” (1946), between two elements in perceptually
based judgment: the opportunity afforded by sensory perception and
judgmental acumen.

The distinction between sensory perception and judgmental acumen
enables Austin to distinguish between central cases of
illusion and central cases of delusion, and also to
sketch explanations of what is going on in those cases that do not make
appeal to sense-data. Austin takes the defender of (i) and (ii) to
argue as follows. First, consider an illusion, for example a stick that
looks bent but really isn't. Such an illusion has two key
features. First, it clearly involves a distinctive sensory experience.
Second, the distinctive sensory experience that it involves is apt to
give rise to an erroneous perceptual judgment, to the effect that the
stick is bent. Now one way of explaining the erroneous perceptual
judgment is to view it as dictated by the sensory
experience—that is, to view it as accurately representing
features presented in the experience: the bent-ness of that which is
experienced. Since the stick is not in fact bent, and that
which is experienced is bent, we have reason to claim that
that which is experienced is not identical with the stick. What we
experience is sense-data rather than a stick. Moreover, we
might also consider more extreme cases in which we make erroneous
perceptual judgments: cases of delusion or hallucination. For example,
there is the case in which an alcoholic person judges that pink rats
are visible, when in fact there are none. Now, given the proposed
account of the case of illusion, that case cannot be distinguished from
the case of delusion by appeal to the fact that, in the former, an
environmental feature is experienced while, in the latter, there is no
suitable environmental feature to be experienced. It therefore seems
natural to treat the two cases as of the same basic type, and to offer
the same type of explanation for both. Thus, one might be tempted to
view the rat-delusion as having the following three features. First, it
involves a distinctive sensory experience. Second, the distinctive
sensory experience that it involves dictates an erroneous
perceptual judgment to the effect that pink rats are visible. Third,
that judgment is dictated because it accurately represents features
present in the experience.

Austin responds as follows. First, he exploits the role of judgmental
acumen in perceptual judgment in order to provide an alternative
explanation of cases of illusion (or more generally of things looking
ways that they are not). He allows that some things really
do look the way they are sometimes taken to be—the
stick looks bent, even though it is not in fact bent. But he holds
that those looks are not private features of individual's
experiences. For example, they are available to other perceivers and
might be recorded in a photograph. (Austin discusses talk about how
things look, and distinguishes it from talk about how
things seem—which he associates with judgment rather
than with experience, in Sense and Sensibilia (1962a:
33–43). See also Jackson 1977: 30–49; Martin 2010; Travis
2004.) However, the way the stick looks, just as much as features like
the stick's straightness, can be the basis for perceptual
judgments. We can explain why someone is prone to judge that the stick
is bent by appeal to the stick's looking bent, rather to
anything's being bent, together with the ways in which exercises of
judgmental acumen can respond erroneously to looks. More generally,
there needn't be anything in particular—any specific feature of
what is experienced or any specific look—that figures in
explaining why individuals are prone to make a specific type of
judgment on the basis of the experience. For the explanation for each
individual's judgment will depend, not only on what they experience,
but also on the types of judgmental capacities that they have. In
support of this form of explanation, Austin notes that not everyone
would be inclined to judge that the stick is bent. For example, noting
the presence of water, those whose judgmental capacities are
sufficiently well trained might withhold judgment about the stick's
shape (Hinton 1973: 114ff includes a useful discussion of some of
Austin's claims about illusions).

Standard cases of illusion or misleading appearance of the sort
we've just considered involve sensory experiences of ordinary
things and their features, including their looks, feels, and so forth.
However, because the connection between what is experienced and what
one judges on its basis is not straightforward—because judgmental
acumen is involved in moving from one to the other—there is no
general way to read back from the judgments someone is prone to make to
specific features of their sensory experiences. Because such cases of
illusion involve experience of ordinary things, while standard cases of
delusion do not, we thus have a ground on which to distinguish the two
sorts of case. For example, we have grounds to distinguish the case in
which someone erroneously judges that a submerged stick is bent from
the case of the alcoholic person who judges that pink rats are visible.
But having distinguished the cases in that way, we are liable to become
open to two new questions. First, should we allow that the judgment in
the delusory case is based on sensory experience? Perhaps, for example,
some cases of delusion involve dysfunction in the systems responsible
for perceptual judgment of a sort that give rise to perceptual
judgments in the absence of any sense-experiential basis for those
judgments. Second, even if we allow that a particular delusory judgment
is based upon sensory experience, should we allow that it involves
sensory experience of anything other than elements that are present in
the deluded subject's environment? Perhaps some cases of delusion
involve dysfunctional judgmental responses to what is seen or heard.
For example, an alcoholic subject judgment that a pink rat is visible
might be a disordered response to an experience of a shadow. Unless we
are forced to answer both questions affirmatively, we lack the basis
for an argument that the deluded subject experiences anything distinct
from the ordinary things and features that they can see, hear, etc.

Austin doesn't suggest that there could be no grounds for
giving affirmative answers to either of those questions. Moreover, it
is very plausible that such grounds can be provided. It is
plausible, for example, that there are distinctive sensory experiences
involved in what we call seeing double, or seeing afterimages, that
cannot be explained simply by appeal to what is present in
subjects' environments. And it is plausible that genuine sensory
hallucinations are possible—indeed, it is plausible that such
hallucinations might figure in explaining the alcoholic person's
judgment. However, although the style of response just considered is
indecisive against such additional developments of the argument, the
resources that it deploys will surely figure in serious engagement with
those developments. Austin sketches an approach to issues raised by
such experiences by attempting to give an account of the reports we are
inclined to make in such cases—“I see two pieces of
paper”, “I see pink rats”. Austin's sketch aims
to explain how such reports can be non-committal about the nature of
the experiences so-reported, and in particular about whether such
experiences have objects at all (1962a:
84–103).
It is here in particular that Austin comes
close to endorsing a form of disjunctivism about perception
(see Soteriou 2009).

The core of Austin's work on freedom and action is contained
in “A Plea for Excuses” (1957) and developed in “Ifs
and Cans” (1956a), “Three Ways of Spilling Ink”
(1966), and “Pretending” (1958a). The three most
distinctive features of his views in this area are the following.

Austin proposes that philosophers should attend to the details
of the ways in which we talk about particular actions of specific types
rather than attempting a more direct assault on general questions about
freedom and action (1957: 175–181; 1966: 273).

Austin holds that in order for someone to count as responsible
for an action, nothing more need be true than that the action is a
normal or standard instance of something they do. For example, it need
not be true of the actor, in addition, that they did what they did
voluntarily or on purpose (1957: 189–204;
1966).

Let's begin with (1). Austin holds that we can make progress
on questions about freedom and action by descending from reflection at
the general level—i.e., reflection on freedom and action, per
se—to reflection on the more specific ways in which we
characterize and appraise actions. Austin's view about the
general notions of acting, and of acting freely or responsibly, is
structurally similar to his view about the general notion of truth: he
thinks of such general notions as dimension words, grouping a
range of more specific characterizations. The basic range here consists
in the various specific ways in which we can characterize happenings as
actions—for example, as someone running to the shop, or as their
reading a book. In addition to that basic range are what Austin calls
aggravations: the various specific ways in which we
characterize someone as distinctively responsible for
something that happens—for example, when we characterize someone
as having done something on purpose, intentionally, or deliberately.
The latter three aggravations are the topic of his “Three Ways
of Spilling Ink” (1966).

In his “A Plea for Excuses” (1957), Austin argues that the
minimal requirement for an agent to be responsible for an action of
theirs is that it be
incorrect to characterize the action in one or another way as
something for which they were not fully responsible—as
something for which they have an excuse. We might, for
example, characterize a happening as an accident, a mistake,
involuntary, unintentional, inadvertent, or as due (in part) to
clumsiness, lack of appreciation of circumstances, or incompetence.
Where an act is performed, and where no excuse is available, the
action is one for which the actor counts as fully responsible. Where
one or another type of excuse is available, the specific type
of excuses that are available mitigate in one or another specific way
the subject's responsibility for the occurrence of an action or its
consequences, and so the extent to which the action is to be counted
as free. An excuse may do this by mitigating in various ways the
subject's responsibility either for an action considered as a whole,
or for proper sub-components of the action, or for consequences of the
action, or by indicating ways in which a happening is not (a
paradigmatic case of) an action. The varieties of pretending
that Austin discusses in his “Pretending” (1958a) are of
importance to him, at least in part, because they provide for some
distinctive forms of excuse. For instance, one might seek to excuse
what appeared to be an action of type A by claiming that the
agent was only pretending to A, pretending to
be A-ing, or pretending that they were A-ing. (One
of Austin's aims in the paper is to distinguish those ways of
pretending.)

One of Austin's central aims in considering the variety of
excuses and aggravations is to shed light on the inner composition of
responsible action: the division between an action and its
consequences; the decomposition of an action into its various
sub-components or phases; and what Austin calls the machinery of
action:

…the detail of the complicated internal machinery we use in
‘acting’—the receipt of intelligence, the
appreciation of the situation, the invocation of principles, the
planning, the control of execution and the rest. (1957: 179)

Turning now to (2), Austin thinks that there is a range of normal or
standard cases of attributions of action with respect to which
modification, by appeal either to aggravations or excuses, is
impermissible. With respect to such normal or standard cases, it
suffices, in order to characterize the agent's role within them,
simply to say what the agent did. To add that the agent did the thing,
for example, either voluntarily or involuntarily would be
inappropriate, incorrect, or even senseless. Austin summarizes this
idea in the slogan, “No modification without aberration”.
Amongst the supporting examples he gives are the following:

I sit in my chair, in the usual way—I am not in a daze or
influenced by threats or the like: here, it will not do to say either
that I sit in it intentionally or that I did not sit in it
intentionally, nor yet that I sat in it automatically or from habit or
what you will. It is bedtime, I am alone, I yawn: but I do not yawn
involuntarily (or voluntarily!), nor yet deliberately. To yawn in any
such peculiar way is just not to just yawn. (1957:
190)[23]

Austin holds that modifiers like “voluntarily” and
“involuntarily” are used to assert the respective presence
and absence of specific elements in the general machinery of action.
(He suggests that such apparent pairs do not invariably target the very
same specific elements. See 1957: 189–193.) Austin thinks that
philosophers have tended to assume that, given that someone has done a
specific thing, it will always be a further question whether those
pieces of machinery are present or absent. Moreover, philosophers have
aligned that question with the question whether the actor was
responsible for what they did or acted freely. Those philosophers have
in effect been making the following pair of assumptions. They've
assumed, first, that there is a single type of piece of machinery such
that for any action, the action will be free and responsible
just in case it involves that machinery. Second, they've assumed
that the various aggravations serve indiscriminately to mark the
presence of the required type of machinery, while the various excuses
serve to mark its absence.

Characteristically, Austin suggests that the situation is more
complicated. In particular, although he thinks that, in normal or
standard cases, actors are responsible for what they do and act freely,
he holds that what makes that so can vary from case to case: different
types of machinery can account for freedom and responsibility with
respect to different types of action. He holds moreover that different
aggravating and excusing modifiers target different pieces of
machinery. And, finally, he holds that the appropriate use of a
modifier doesn't depend only upon the presence or absence of
instances of the type of action-machinery that it targets. In addition,
it depends upon whether the targeted machinery figures in normal cases
of actions of the type in
question.[24]

Let's turn now to Austin's discussion of whether
determinism is compatible with free action ((3) above). One general
form of excuse for doing something would be that one couldn't
avoid doing it. Similarly, a general excuse for failing to do
something—failing to apply one's brakes, for
example—would be that one couldn't do it. Excuses
of that general type have figured centrally in discussions of human
freedom and the bearing of determinism on whether we ever act freely.
Suppose that, wherever an excuse of this form is correctly applicable,
we are not responsible for the action targeted by the excuse and did
not act freely. If this supposition were correct, a demonstration that
there are no things that we do that we could have avoided doing, and no
things that we do not do that we could have done, would amount to a
demonstration that we are never responsible for doing, or refraining
from doing, what we do and, so, never act freely. And some philosophers
have held that determinism provides the basis for such a
demonstration.

Such a demonstration might take the following form. The all-in claim
that someone could have done something at t requires that the
circumstances at t are consistent with their doing that thing
at t. But according to determinism, the circumstances,
C, at t determine that one set of events, E,
occurs at t rather than any others. That is, according to the
thesis of determinism, it couldn't be that (C &
not-E). Now, given that what the individual in question in
fact did at t (/refrained from doing at t) is a
member of E, it couldn't have been that C and
yet they failed to do it (/failed to refrain from doing it). Hence,
because of C, it's not the case that they could have
avoided doing what they did (/refraining from doing it).

Austin considers this issue in his “Ifs and Cans” (1956a). There, he discusses and
rejects attempts in Moore 1912 and Nowell-Smith 1954 to provide
accounts of what we can do on which it being true that we can do things
(/refrain from doing them) is compatible with its being determined by
our circumstances that we don't in fact do them (/refrain from
doing them). Austin thinks that his objections to the accounts on which
he focuses provide partial support to the view that our ordinary claims
about what we can do are incompatible with determinism.

The first proposal of Moore's that Austin considers is that the claim
that someone, S, can do something, A, is equivalent
to the following claim: S will A, if S
chooses to A. Austin argues that Moore's first proposal is
based on a mistaken view about the functioning of the claims of the
form: “S can A, if S
chooses”.[25]
The second proposal of Moore's that Austin considers is the claim that
“S can A” is equivalent to a claim of
the form “If it were that C, then S
would B”. For example, “I could have holed the
putt” might be taken to be equivalent to “If I had tried
to hole the putt, I would have succeeded in holing the putt.”
Here again, it seems that the proposal might be of service in
sidestepping the challenge posed by determinism. Suppose that in
actual circumstances C, I don't try to hole the
putt. According to determinism, it follows that it is impossible that
(C and I do try to hole the putt). But that is consistent
both with its being possible, in slightly different circumstances,
that I try to hole the putt, and with it being the case that, if I
were to try, I would succeed. Austin doesn't pursue the proposal in
detail, though his discussion of Nowell-Smith pursues connected issues
(219–230). However, in a footnote, Austin presents an important
putative counterexample:

Consider the case where I miss a very short putt and kick myself
because I could have holed it. It is not that I should have holed it if
I had tried: I did try, and missed. It is not that I should have holed
it if conditions had been different: that might of course be so, but I
am talking about conditions as they precisely were, and asserting that
I could have holed it. There is the rub. (1956a: 218 fn.1)

Austin's thought here is that attributions of this sort
manifest our belief that,

…a human ability or power or capacity is inherently liable
not to produce success, on occasion, and that for no reason (or are bad
luck and bad form sometimes reasons?). (218: 218 fn.1)

Now a committed determinist would claim that the events that
constitute such failures must be determined—and in that sense
explained—by the circumstances at and before the failure. But
Austin believes—for reasons in effect considered above—that
the existence of such an explanation would make it the case that, in
fact, the golfer could not have made the putt in the
circumstances as they precisely were.

We have here, then, a point at which Austin expresses his view that
ordinary attributions of ability, power, and capacity are incompatible
with the thesis of determinism. In response, the compatibilist is
forced, I think, to deny that its being true that a golfer could have
holed the putt, or even that he could have holed the putt in precisely
the same conditions, entails that he would have holed the putt in a
perfect duplicate of the actual world. Leaving that issue to
one side, Austin presents the proposed analysis with a case of
masking—a case in which, although ability is retained,
successful exercise of the ability is somehow precluded, for instance
by outside interference (for discussion of masking, see Bird 1998;
Clarke 2009; Fara 2008; and Johnston 1992). The challenge facing the
defender of the analysis is to spell out the analysis so as to cope
with masking. Arguably, meeting the challenge depends upon provision of
a non-circular specification of all possible masks. Austin would, I
think, claim that it is impossible to meet the challenge. For on his
view, abilities are sometimes masked brutely, without any
specifiable mask. Even if he is wrong about that, it remains an open
question whether the challenge can be met, or whether the endless
heterogeneity of potential masks makes it impossible to provide an
explanatory specification.

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